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hypnosec writes "In its latest attempt to stop Mozilla from going ahead with its proposed default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox, the Interactive Advertising Bureau took out a full page ad urging users to stop 'Mozilla from hijacking the Internet.' Through the advert, IAB has claimed that the Firefox maker wants to be the 'judge and jury' when it comes to business models on the web. According to the IAB, Mozilla wants to eliminate the cookies which enable online advertisers to reach the right audience. IAB notes that 'If cookies are eliminated, it is clear to us that consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience.'"

"No, they are also afraid of us getting a less diverse Internet experience.

The only time I want your "internet" to differ from mine is when I actively log in."

What kind of nonsense is this?

The only difference here is whether somebody accepts cookies or not in their own browser. It's kind of like choosing which sources of email are spam and which are not. YOU get to choose.

Frankly, I have never once heard any of the advertisers credibly argue that they want either "diversity" or "conformity". What they want is to control what you see in your own home.

The internet is NOT about me having "the same experience" as you. It's about me having the freedom to do what the hell I want. If YOU want to see the same things, including all the same ads, as everybody else, then you can choose that. But stay the hell out of MY computer!

But that isn't really it, either. In fact, we have proof that this isn't about "having the same experience" at all. It's about information gathering and targeted ads. Blocking the cookies means they don't get to make your experience different from everybody else's.

If you don't accept their cookies, they will send you totally random ads - feminine hygiene products, mayonnaise, Mall of America, etc. The chances are that you will be interested in less than 5% of them. If you take their cookies, they will follow you from Slashdot, Apple, and Honda, then send you an ad for a car with an iPhone interface. At least there is a higher chance you'd be interested, or at least not completely pissed off at the stupid ads.

They don't want to send you ads for stupid or irrelevant stuff, because that's worse than a waste of bandwidth - it may drive you to seek out an ad blocker.

A big part of their problem is their history of sending crap ads that used the same cookie technology.

What might work better is an "anonymous cookie" technology. Instead of sending you a personally identifiable ID, let them access a special "topical cookie area" that has a finite set of pre-defined categories with a finite set of ratings (low/medium/high), and your surfing habits would change the levels of the topics. Slashdot might boost a TECH cookie to "high", and lower your other cookies slightly. Visiting Kimberly-Clark would boost your HOUSEHOLD cookie. Ford would boost your CAR interest. Advertisers could look only at that shared pool of topical cookies and decide which ads to show you. There are lots of details to work out, of course, but it could help preserve anonymity while not completely shutting out targeted ads.

Maybe they shouldn't have started using full screen flash ads that you have to click through in order to get rid of, or auto-playing noise.... if they'd stayed relatively innocuous, most Internet users probably wouldn't have bothered to find ways to get rid of them.

The most insidious thing the advertisers do is act as malware vectors with the heaps of untrusted javascript they sling around with wild abandon. As soon as they show that they care about my security I might take an interest in seeing their ads to help them out with their financial security. That's a worthwhile social contract to have. One which they can't be bothered to hold up.

Yeah, there you go. The selfish knee-jerk ad-hating with no awareness of reality or real business.

Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.

If you bother to take a deep dive into reality, there are tens-of-thousands of long-tail websites that rely on advertising to remain online and perhaps even pay salaries. They also pay hosting providers who happen have people working for them. Those hosting providers also have their own vendors, and so on. The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.

Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.

When the ads come up on OTA television, I can get up and go to the bathroom or mute the TV and have a conversation with the person sitting next to me.

As for the $4.95 magazine (or the pay TV for that matter), I choose not to pay for the privilege of being advertised at. Ignoring that point, however, the ads on the $4.95 magazine do not pop up and block my page until I tear it away. It also most especially doesn't dance around the page forcing me to chase it in order to find the corner I can tear off to get rid of it. Most of the time, it also doesn't play obnoxious music or video at me when I turn to the page it's on, nor does it play animated blinking clashing colours to try to get my attention. Additionally, the ad I'm looking at in Time Magazine does not know that I also bought a subscription to Popular Science.

Advertisers would have a *lot* more sympathy if they'd stop with that kind of shenanigan. While I understand that the Internet is largely supported by advertising, and that if you choose not to have ads you either need a paywall or to lose money (I have a self-hosted blog running from one of my colocated servers that doesn't have ads), I also understand that advertising as it is today detracts from the overall user experience on the Internet. I would be more amenable to advertising if they'd stop being shitheads.

If you bother to take a deep dive into reality, there are tens-of-thousands of long-tail websites that rely on advertising to remain online and perhaps even pay salaries.

You know what, the problems with their business model aren't my problem. If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party... well, tough.

The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.

I'm not stealing their content, I'm viewing what they've made publicly available on the internet. If they want to go subscription only so I can't see it for free, well, I'll stop seeing their site. Such is life.

And I'm not breaking any social contract, and I'm not using their bandwidth, I'm using my bandwidth -- because I pay for my internet, and the amount I can access is metered. Arguably, the advertising asshats are using my bandwidth by putting all that extra crap I didn't request.

If a site serves their own advertising (and they're not Flash or otherwise annoying animated stuff), I won't block their ads. If they rely on 3rd parties I have absolutely no reason to trust, I will block everything which is a reference to an external site. Because I have no interest in providing information to those 3rd parties, because they provide nothing of value to me -- in fact they provide negative value by expecting me to give up information about myself in return to being marketed to.

You know what, the problems with their business model aren't my problem. If their business model requires I provide information to a 3rd party... well, tough.

This is a point that gets lost in a lot of discussions about pervasive tracking on the internet and the necessity of advertising. Your business model does not have a right to exist. People seem to forget this. This is what regulations are for. If a business model is unethical, it should not exist. Just because ponzi schemes are a business model that works for some people, does not mean that that business model should exist. Tracking users without permission is unethical.

Besides, the internet existed before there were any ads. And, it existed before pervasive tracking. Nature hates a vacuum, especially when there is money to be made. Another form of advertising / monetization scheme will take the place of the completely unethical and, frankly, irresponsible, one that we have now.

Arguably, the advertising asshats are using my bandwidth by putting all that extra crap I didn't request.

Hear, hear!You want me to be unable to block your ads or your tracking? Then give me the option of broadband for FREE instead of having to pay for it. Otherwise, fuck off, I'll keep using NoScript and AdBlock+ and FlashBlock and anything else I can get my hands on to keep control over what gets on my screen and what gets run on my hardware. You don't like it? Tough shit.

If your ad-based business model isn't working, it's time to switch business models, not complain that it isn't working.

steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.

Social contract? What?

Are people who go changes the channel during a commercial break on TV stealing the TV shows? No. Is someone who only downloads the parts of a web page that they are interested in viewing stealing the content? No.

If you don't want your web server to behave as a web server, don't use a web server. The browser should act on behalf of the user and nobody else.

Yes, the ad-supported model isn't ideal, and has been exploited by bad people. But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.

I don't mind some ads as long as they don't overlay the content. But in the last 1-2 years, annoying popups that cover up the content I'm interested in have become pretty common. Those are more like stickers on every page you have to pull off before you can read your $4.95 magazine.

For me that was the reason to finally install NoScript. And no, I don't believe in your social contract. By visiting a website, I don't promise to watch everything there. Things that get too annoying I will ignore, or tell my browser to ignore them for me.

But we are getting a bit off topic:The article was about tracking by third party cookies, and the associated worries about privacy intrusion. In that I agree with Mozilla, and the new default is only what I have had for years.

The article was about tracking by third party cookies, and the associated worries about privacy intrusion. In that I agree with Mozilla, and the new default is only what I have had for years.

Yes, I think it's worth remembering that this move is not about ad-blocking, just third-party-cookie blocking. Mozilla is not going to ship AdBlock by default or anything. A site can show whatever ads they want, 1st-party or 3rd-party. They can also store 1st-party cookies. What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits. Those are used for multiple things, and ad-targeting is only one of them. Some of the companies also act as data brokers and outright sell the collected profiles, without anonymizing the data.

What will no longer work by default is 3rd-party cookies, because they are used to track people around the 'net as they browse between different sites, which lets companies build centralized dossiers of people's browsing habits.

Unfortunately, they are not used by just that. There are plenty of other scenarios that work with 3rd parties cookies and will be broken if not. One example is the use of a CDN (Akamai, etc.) which quickly point out the need for a subdomain. So your traffic through Akamai will go through a domain and your direct traffic will go through a subdomain. All of a sudden, one JS file that used to store a cookie cannot do it anymore... And your entire website is broken.

The problem with this is that changing something that big will invariably break plenty of websites. And the only ones to suffer from this will be Mozilla as people will quickly learn to go through other browsers because "Mozilla is b0rked".

This option exists right now, but isn't the default. Many Firefox users set this option right now and don't have any issues.

If you need a third-party cookie for your website to function correctly, you're doing it wrong.

I am not opposed to ads. I'm opposed to ads using loud obnoxious flashing popup, popunder, Malware spewing crap that reminds me of the days of Geocities websites. The ad companies have done this to themselves, I have NO sympathy for them.

The rule of asshole applies here. Assholes are assholes, because they think they can get away with it. When people stop dealing with assholes, they become irate that they have no friends and whine about how everyone hates them and how the world is unfair to them. And they ruin it for the people who are doing things right. In short, assholes ruin things for everyone, including themselves, they just don't care, hence why they are assholes.

There isn't enough time or energy in this life for me to want to deal with assholes. I view assholes as damage and route around them. It they whine in the process, I don't care.

Once again, "Team America" applies to F-heads making demands on the rest of us. ..

. . . . and so. . ..

Mozilla is a bunch of dicks! They're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Internet Advertising Board are pussies. And the Advertisers are assholes. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes who just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate — and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

Team America: is there ANY situation it's not applicable for these days ???

1) *I* break a social contract? Excuse me, but can I please have the right to decide what is being downloaded onto my computer myself?I am not obliged to sit through 10 minutes of annoying commercials I do not want to see (looking at you, Disney DVDs!), and neither am I required to use extra bandwidth to download advertisements that I do not want to see.

2) you may as well argue that anyone blocking ads increases the value for the website: by removing themselves from the pool of people exposed to ads, they improve the click-through ratio.

3) It's not my job to support anyone else's business model. You're right to point out that it *is* a business model, and that blocking ads undermines it. Sure. There may be consequences. Sure. But I get to decide if I care about those consequences, not you.(Pro-tip: if you do, you can turn off ad-blocking for the site, though that'll hurt their click-through ratio.)

But the reality is that you get free content where the percentage of pixels on a page devoted to ads is typically much less than the percentage minutes of ads on free OTA television, and less than the percentage of inches in a $4.95 magazine. Oh boo-hoo.

The reality is, we pay for that content. Someone somewhere is buying something they otherwise wouldn't have, and is paying enough extra to fund the creaton of that content. Since we're paying either way, it stands to reason that it will be more efficient if we pay for it directly and cut out the middle man AND we'll get more honest content, instead of that slanted towards getting the most clicks, and showing advertisers in a good light.

Ad supported content is crap all around. It's a nasty hack on capitalism that would have no reason to exist in an economy that serves the people, instead of the other way around.

The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.

Pssst - If your business model depends on annoying people - You don't get to claim the moral high-ground when people get annoyed. You simply vanish when they find a way to avoid you.

"Stop shooting me with that nerf gun!"
"But I get paid to do it - And you wouldn't want the toy stores, and the trucking companies, and Nerf itself, and and the plastic manufacturer, and the oil companies to go out of business would you???"

That was a very eloquent defense of ads. I'm sure there were more eloquent defenses of the horse and buggy industry a century ago. We certainly lost some things by transitioning to cars. The climate change for one, a faster pace, more deaths due to accidents...

Trying to shame people into viewing ads is going to change a few people's minds, but it's still a dead industry. The changes may not be good, but they're still going to happen.

This reminds me of a passage I read recently... I think it was from Uncle Tom's Cabin. There's a slave, trying to get a third party to do something or other, and the slave tells the third party that they simply must do this thing, otherwise, the slaves master will beat him, and it will be the fault of the third party.

The people behind the propaganda embedded in these websites don't built houses, they don't plant food. They're middle men. Humanity has no need for them. It's been pretty clearly demonstrated that people in information technology are capable of putting middle men out of business. It's so easy we do it in our spare time.

Ad supported as a concept is fine. There are plenty of sites that I enjoy, which have unobtrusive ads. I whitelist them to make sure they're getting enough ad hits to stay afloat.

However the vast majority of ad-supported websites are so obnoxious that the entire sites become unusable without adblock and noscript. I recently got a refresher in this, through Steam's built-in browser. Wanted to do a quick search for an in-game item.. the wiki to which I was directed had full-screen pop up ads completely ob

Fuck your "business". I remember a different web. I remember a web that actually HAD content. It might not have been as polished. It might not have been as social. But there was untold original content. I remember a web where if someone put up a list of things, they just put up a list. On one page. They didn't string it out over several pages for ad impressions. I remember being curious about something simple, querying %searchengine%, and being able to glean the answer from the results. I didn't have to click through for the benefit of someone's metrics. Your "business" has enabled nothing great that I have ever seen. Your "business" makes the web uglier, noisier, and less helpful. Your "business" introduces lame presentation formats and (thanks to insecure hosting) opens my less knowledgeable friends and family to malware infections that they probably wouldn't encounter on their own.

You say your business pays for the web? Guess what. If the entire advertising industry were to dry up tonight, there would still be people putting things on the web tomorrow. Next week. Next month. Next year. Because people want to express themselves. The bar might be set a little higher. Content producers might have to pony up a bit to be heard. But content will still be produced.

If every bit of O.C. disappeared overnight, how long do you think people would stay online looking at your ads?

If you bother to take a deep dive into reality, there are tens-of-thousands of long-tail websites that rely on advertising to remain online and perhaps even pay salaries.

I run a long-tail website, a free online game with about a thousand players. Been doing that for over 12 years. Never had a single banner ad anywhere.

You can run a small website without advertisement. For my game, player donations keep it running, and they are much higher than I would've ever thought. For a site with less interaction and shorter visits like an online magazine, that probably won't work, but I still challenge your assumption that advertisement is the only way to finance the long-tail websites. It isn't. There are many other ways.

But the ad industry works both ways. It not only sells us to their advertisement customers, it also sells itself to their customers by convincing them that advertisement is necessary, beneficial, or the only way to get paid anymore in this world.

Wait a minute. A couple of days ago the kerfluffle on Slashdot was that Mozilla removed the "disable JavaScript" option from the options screen of Firefox 23.0. I thought that made them evil. Now, they're going to disable third party cookies, so now that makes them good again? I'm so confused.

Why can't they be more like Microsoft, so we can just hate on them 24 x 7?

Wait a minute. A couple of days ago the kerfluffle on Slashdot was that Mozilla removed the "disable JavaScript" option from the options screen of Firefox 23.0. I thought that made them evil. Now, they're going to disable third party cookies, so now that makes them good again? I'm so confused.

Mozilla removed the menu option to disable Javascript. They aren't removing the option to disable/enable 3rd party cookies, they're just changing what it's set to when you first install it.

Personally, I run NoScript so the Java thing doesn't affect me, and already turn off 3rd party cookies.

You can probably still disable JavaScript through about:config. But for Joe Average that option is unlikely to be something he WANTS to change, and if he changes it by accident everything will be broken and he won't know why. It'll look like Firefox is a bad browser to him.

> if he changes it by accident everything will be broken and he won't know why.

If that is the case, "you're doing it wrong". There are so many ways to fix that without simply denying the option to everyone:

1) hide the option behind "advanced" options, requiring more clicks to get to. There's a reason for a GUI rather than having people hack.ini files.2) providing explicit documentation, at the location of the control, explaining the effects. Maybe even a test-drive URL showing the difference.3) providing a "first-time mulligan" when javascript is blocked... a "you have javascript disabled and this page uses it. want to re-enable it?" type of event.

Why was I forced to google to find out wtf the IAB is? I'm not an MBA and have nothing to do with the ad industry, and I imagine few other slashdotters do either. It's the international Advertising Bureau.

BTW, good mods on the parent post. The IAB is afraid of us taking OUR internet BACK.

Hopefully no-one. When I started surfing there weren't any ads... NONE. Pages were made by people that cared about the topics they were writing about. And this isn't going to stop ads... it just going to stop them from tracking you. The add can still be there, you can still click on it if you want their crap.

And this isn't going to stop ads... it just going to stop them from tracking you.

Realistically this won't stop them from tracking you either, it will just escalate the arms race. Which isn't necessarily bad, but lets not fool ourselves into thinking this is going to make tracking stop.

Most of the stuff that is ad-supported is crap. At best they are things that I might pay for, if they were not cluttered with ads and riddled with attempts to violate my privacy. Read that again, IAB. I would _pay_ for good content. No, not as much as you think, but pay I would. No, not for crap, but for useful content. Figure it out. There's a way to make money off of me. Spying on me isn't it.

I'm still waiting for integration of AdBlock plus. Being in the top 10 installed plugins means that users want this feature.

No, just no. I don't want some unknown person at some 3rd party company deciding which web sites are blocked or not. I wouldn't mind seeing them add a generic URL/IP blacklist which you can maintain yourself, or choose to integrate with a blacklisting service like AdBlock.

I'm not even against ads but I don't like being tracked by ads servers getting my IP address, my browser fingerprint ( https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [eff.org] ), and the page I was reading (referrer).

AdBlock doesn't do any of those things, all it does is prevent your browser from sending requests to specific IP's which the Adblock people have decided are serving ads. You'll need a scriptblocker to prevent a lot of those things, and for some of them (such as your browser UID) you'll need an additional plugin which masks or falsifies your browser string and referrer information. To block IP the only way to be sure you're hiding it is to make use of some sort of an anonymous proxy service, use Tor, a VPN, etc. And there's always the chance that the people serving ads switch up their IP which will bypass AdBlock until the maintainers discover the change and update their blacklist. (Yes, I know you can mange the blacklist yourself, but if you're an advanced enough user to do that reliably you can be even more effective and block it via hosts file and/or blackhole it at your edge router)

equestPolicy and NoScript are two more good plugins for controlling what info your browser gives to who.

NoScript is an awesome plugin, especially from a security viewpoint, but there is still a lot of information a web site can relay to advertisers without using scripts. And NoScript can be intimidating and confusing for novice users, who are often unsure which sites to allow permanently, and which to deny permanently. So I don't know that it would be a good thing to include in the default install either.

NoScript is an awesome plugin, especially from a security viewpoint, but there is still a lot of information a web site can relay to advertisers without using scripts.

If you like NoScript - check out RequestPolicy [requestpolicy.com] - think of it as an inverse hosts file - instead of blocking individual trackers you whitelist sites instead. Not only that, but the whitelisting is on a per web-server basis, e.g. you can let ESPN's include stuff from doubleclick without letting any other sites include stuff from doubleclick.

It makes the interweb soo much faster and protects against fingerprinting because your browser never even connects to the fingerpinter much less hands over any identifyi

Blocking third-party cookies doesn't stop companies from including advertisements on web pages. What it does is stop companies from being able to collect data that tells them "From our tracking cookies, you went to sites X, Y, and Z, so we should show you advertisements for this group of products because we think that you will be more likely to respond to them than advertisements from that group of products.

and as such will act on what they believe will increase their market share. This basically means that they will do what the users want as often as possible, which on the internet includes not loading every cookie from every third-party on earth. It's not their fault that humans hate businesses.

Interesting phrase "Right now consumers have control over whether they receive interest-based ads through the Digital Advertising
Alliance’s self-regulatory program." Yep, and here's the consumers' response to how well your "self-regulatory" program works. It doesn't. Since the DAA isn't acting in a desirable manner, the consumers are doing this instead. If the advertisers were less obnoxious (and big brother-ish) then the consumers wouldn't resort to drastic measures. Also (as noted in the summary), Mozilla appears to be "default blocking" of third-party cookies. If the consumers found that the benefits of the more "relevant and diverse Internet experience" were worth it, they can still turn them on. Opt-in instead of Opt-Out. Oh, what, nobody would opt-in? Wonder why....

You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.

Do you know how effective the blocking of 3rd party cookies in Safari is? It isn't. It's useless because people found ways to circumvent it quite a while ago and it's never been fixed.

Don't believe me? Clear all of the cookies from Safari, and then visit one website of your choosing. Now, count the number of cookies you have. You'll notice you've got several 3rd party cookies that failed to be blocked.

So, no Safari doesn't already do this -- they have a setting which looks like it should, but my direct experience with it is that it is completely ineffective at doing any blocking of 3rd party stuff.

I wish it did work better, but the reality is, it doesn't. In fact, it doesn't appear to work at all.

You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.

That's correct. I rarely use it, only when web developing, and I found interesting that it came set to block 3rd party cookies by default, but I haven't tested whether it works or not. It seems then that Firefox will indeed be the first to actually achieve this. Thanks for the correction!

There are too many stories of ads delivering malware or otherwise compromising someone's computer. If we can reduce the number of systems that are added to a C&C network, we'll all be that much better off.

Of course, for the tin foil hat folks, big brother is watching out for you.:)

"If cookies are eliminated, it is clear to us that consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience."

1) No, you dicks will just come up with some new way to spy on us, and we'll come up with a new workaround. So it goes.

2) I'll believe that targeted advertising delivers a 'relevant and diverse experience' the day the ads show me stuff I want to buy but haven't yet, instead of stuff I just fucking bought; as it stands, most "targeted ads" are essentially a redux of the contents of your last Amazon shopping cart.

2) I'll believe that targeted advertising delivers a 'relevant and diverse experience' the day the ads show me stuff I want to buy but haven't yet, instead of stuff I just fucking bought; as it stands, most "targeted ads" are essentially a redux of the contents of your last Amazon shopping cart.

This is so true. "You just purchased a washing machine. You might like... a washing machine." It probably works for books, movies, and toilet paper - but it's really funny when you buy something big-ticket.

Let's be honest about this, you wish to gather information about me in order to fulfill your wishes to make money off me.

I'm not prepared to give you that information. I don't care about your business model -- I care about my privacy, and not having douchebags like the IAB know enough about me to do targeted advertising.

When I visit a website, I haven't signed an agreement with you saying I'll see your ads, and provide you with information to track me.

So websites like advertising.com and brightcove and eyereturn... those are blocked at my firewall. You don't ask my consent to collect information about me, and I don't need your consent to deny it to you.

Stop acting like your'e entitled to this information, or that what you think is going to make you the most money isn't against our best interests.

Now, if Apple could only competently block 3rd party cookies in Safari, I'd have yet another browser I can use to keep these idiots away.

Yeah, and spammers used to cry that spam filters were breaking the internet too. And infringing their "free speach [sic] rights." But honestly, what parasite welcomes its host's attempt to dislodge it?

If the feculent leeches in the Internet advertising/data mining industry (and/or social media industry, for that matter) object, this is a great indication that Mozilla is doing the right thing. On the backs of Google, DoubleClick, Facebook, and a host of other advertising and data mining organizations, the Web has become infected with a continually encroaching plague of bots, cookies, tracking, and other privacy obliteration techniques that become even more and more egregious as time continues. Hostile and persistent, pervasive and privacy-obliterating, advertising on the Internet has gotten out of hand. Monetizing "You" has become the primary target and is completely unfettered by privacy regulations in the US (though, the EU is at least a little better in this regard). The data mined and sold by these advertisers has become so all-encompassing and we've all see the ramifications thereof.

If blocking third party cookies is such a major blow to these advertisers, so much the better. Crying over lacking the ability to follow users with invisible 1-pixel trackers across their entire browsing experience is insulting. Users can and should always opt in to their information being stored elsewhere or allowed to be tracked - I'd be quite satisfied if Firefox's default turned off cookies all together. While I'd like to see more of the feature set of AdBlock Plus/Edge, Disconnect, HTTPS Everywhere, BetterPrivacy, and NoScript actually implemented natively in Firefox with sane defaults, this is a great first start. Mozilla has again proved that products like Firefox and Thunderbird are some of the only major, "Newbie to Guru Usable", cross-platform FOSS programs of their kind that are built with the user's experience as the primary goal, rather than to cater to some sort of data mining or advertising network. Sane defaults that place the choice to reveal information and do so in a way that ensures the user is fully informed of the options, is paramount. Anything that can be done to cut the lifeline of these disgusting, shameless, money-grubbing entities is a benefit, and so I applaud Mozilla and hope they are not dissuaded by this temper-tantrum thrown by these corrupt, petulant children.

The Mozilla foundation has yet to do anything that makes me suspect they have nefarious intentions. I cannot hardly begin to say the same about advertising or marketing people. Most or sleazier than that underside of a toilet seat. If Mozilla is causing problems for these people, stfu. I'm behind Mozilla 100%.

I use Adblock Plus and Noscript. Not because I have something in particular against advertising in general, but because I've personally seen more than enough abusive practices to put an end to it myself.

Ya know, like drive-by malware through ad networks.

Until the industry adopts some real standards and actively polices them, then you, IAB and everyone else, can fuck right off.

"If cookies are eliminated, it is clear to us that consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience."

1) I'm not a "consumer". I'm a person.

2) Advertising in the U.S. has become more and more disgusting. Most ads include some dishonesty. A lot of advertising is extremely evil, such as trying to get people to eat expensive sugary food. In my opinion, you at the IAB represent one of the most destructive social forces in the United States. Most ads are attempts to get people to waste their money.

3) You don't know what experience I want. My internet interests cannot be predicted by knowing what I did in the past.

4) I don't buy things because of ads. I do research. I spend money carefully, not because I saw an ad written by someone who thinks he is smarter than me and can take advantage of some weakness in me.

5) You at the IAB obviously have NO technical knowledge. If the Mozilla browsers don't block "cookies" from being stored on my computers, I can block them other ways. And will! You have an opinion about something you don't understand.

6) A large part of what causes people to block advertising is moving pictures, which are distracting when someone is trying to read. If you want ads accepted, avoid making them intrusive and annoying.

They use sidebar ads to repeat brands and brand attributes, since repetition leads to better recall. Then they research what sites consumers like you use to research products, and seed those sites (including, yes, Wikipedia) with information, reviews and other content that will build up their products and steer you away from other products (often by rigging evaluation criteria or "what you should look for in...").

"Finding stuff you're interested in on the Internet is easy these days. That's because advertisers can tailor ads to specific interests through the responsible and transparent use of cookies."

No, it isn't. This the lie you love to perpetuate. The reason my web browser plugins include an ad-blocker is that you have, time and time again, steadfastly proven that you're entirely incapable of grasping the terms 'responsible' and 'transparent.'

"But Mozilla wants to eliminate the same cookies that enable advertisers to reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time."

Let's say someone purchased a copy of Robert Towne's film Personal Best online. The next thing they know, they're drowning in ads for lesbian erotica. The niceties of lesbian erotica aside, perhaps our someone didn't buy the film for that reason, but it's telling that's the only aspect you trout-brained nincompoops regard, so it's the wrong audience and the wrong message. And as for the "right time," decades of abuse long before the Internet's advent have shown that you think it's in the time frame of dinnertime.

"Mozilla claims it's in the interest of privacy. Truth is, we believe it's about helping some business models gain a marketplace advantage and reducing competition."

As the song says, it's your misfortune and none of my own. What is this bizarre sense of entitlement that posesses you?

"Right now consumers have control over whether they receive interest-based ads through the Digital Advertising Alliance's self-regulatory program."

Oh, yeah. That "opt-out" you love to foist on us all. That's kind of like getting down on one's hands and knees asking the cockroaches skittering across the kitchen floor to please stop that.

"It appears that Mozilla wants to be 'judge and jury' for business models on the Net."

I can't speak for Mozilla, but I'd be willing to bet they could care even less than I do about your "business models."

"If cookies are eliminated, it is clear to us that consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience."

A "relevant and diverse Internet experience" doesn't include pop-ups that obscure what I'm trying to read, or those full-window ads that shut out the entire web page, unless one happens to be a total freakin' idiot, a sociopath, or some combination of the two, which would explain why the lot of you think this crap is such a grand idea.

"Send an email to StopMozilla@aboutads.info to tell Mozilla you don't want them hijacking cookies on the Internet."

Is there an address I can use to tell you all to intercourse yourselves? Because it's all about choices, as you love to say, and that's the choice I want.

The next logical step would be legal harassment, either via lobbying efforts ("Senator, Mozilla's block could cost the US advertising industry hundreds of millions, and potentially tens of billions lost off the economy due to decreased purchasing!") or direct attacks (Sue the Mozilla foundation for interference in contract).

Well I run a site (see "homepage" link) that wasn't made for advertising, but it has allowed me, for a brief time at least, to devote my time to researching the information and purchasing materials for researching the information. Much of what you see on the site is online through my effort first. A whole lot is parsed by me from low-quality images that can't be searched, OCRd or otherwise rendered (see what I did there?) useful for people requiring answers. I tried to behave as respectfully towards my users as I could - no extraneous pages to click through, no annoying ads, and I made the decision to serve only text ads. I guess I'm SOL for now, but it would be nice not to be hated for just trying to make ends meet and doing what I love.

From my point of view, the advertisers are the problem for another reason - they have ridiculously high demands for honouring payments, like not only must a user click, they must complete so and so action or the click doesn't count (which leads to ever more prominent, gaudy ads to try and bait users to click), extremely low revenue if the metric is views rather than clicks, etc. There is also zero transparency from their side - a click is valid or not on their say-so alone.

Hopefully this will push ads towards a more peaceful and unobtrusive pay-to-display model - as per any other medium that has ads at all.

Nice post, but not relevant - TFA (and TFS) was about blocking 3rd party cookies, not ads. Turning off 3rd party cookies by default makes it more difficult to track you across the internet (ostensibly to present you with targeted advertising) - it does nothing to eliminate the advertising itself. That would still have to happen via addons or other means.